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Dana Schutz smothers her paintings in heavy layers of gooey paint. Her first proper London exhibition is a splodgy, orgiastic celebration of her medium, but significant themes are subtly embedded if you manage to uncover them.

The Artist's Technique

Her method – earning her acclaim as one of the most important figurative artists of her generation – is all about surface, brush strokes, colour and materiality. It’s painting for painters, truly advanced art-nerd stuff. Should you enjoy losing yourself in layers of pigment and shadow, there’s enough here to engage you for a while. But it’s her bizarre, dreamlike, animated, symbolic visuals that truly drives the paintings tick.

Initial Exhibition Pieces

The works in the first gallery are populated by enormous one-eyed beings and roaring mobs. In one shows a group of figures trudges mindlessly towards something off canvas, brandishing fists and leaving a trail of debris in their path. In another presents a person receiving a huge mask in an odd initiation ritual before a horde of unattractive followers. It’s easy to interpret these as political, as observation on the state of the US, on societal splits and furious, and crowd psychology is turning everything to rubbish.

The Kiss by the artist.

Shift in Focus

In the second exhibition area, the artist appears to shift her focus to the people in power, rather than the masses that support them. Mysterious forms fill their faces with grapes and steak in a gloomy eating space; a cardinal and a green-clad man recline in golden chairs – whereas in additional pieces a couple comfort one another in a scene filled with corpses, and a woman, maybe Schutz herself, rests unclothed, desolate and powerless in a bed.

Inspirations and References

This is ultradense, thickly layered stuff, filled with allusions. There’s the ethereal dream-like signs of Odilon Redon, the fleshy pink cartoonishness of Philip Guston, the carnival grotesqueries of a Belgian artist, the big-headed weirdness of Paul McCarthy. She includes nods on the history of painting, countless nods to mainstream media (It seems certain that a particular work is a portrait of Handsome Squidward from an animated series). It would take time identifying all the elements from classic painters with which she’s littered the works.

A Model by the exhibitor.

Interpretation and Narratives

Art this complex, intricate and symbolic invites to analysis. I feel as if I’m being quizzed on the meaning of a Renaissance masterpiece but, in my view, there are two relatively clear narratives: the ruling class, and the public that they provoke.

The 2017 Scandal

And the artist understands about such dynamics. In 2017, her artwork a titled piece – a partly abstract representation of the corpse of a historical figure, a black teenager who was lynched by racist perpetrators in Mississippi in 1955 – caused untold controversy when it was displayed at the Whitney Biennial. Critics charged her of exploiting black death for her personal benefit. An activist demonstrated against the painting daily, and others demanded it to be removed. An artist of European descent painting – perhaps compassionately – a image of black pain was the major headline of the event. It was the peak of the recent culture wars, a time that saw people turning on each other even if they were on the same side. Looking back now, in a society increasingly polarized, less nuanced and angrier than ever, it seems almost charming that people had the time to get upset at this emotional, mournful artwork.

Aftermath and Recent Art

This might have ended her career, and the artist likely aims to progress. But everything she’s done now exists in its shadow. She unavoidably emerged of that ordeal a transformed creator. But what remains constant is how good she is, how she still engages in masterful, unsettling, thick and highly topical art at the highest level.